Walking
into Bikram’s Yoga College of India studio is comparable to stepping
out of an air-conditioned airport into a very hot, very humid South
East Asian country. It’s another world. It is also the newest trend to
hit Sydney.

It's Hot Yoga.

The aptly named Hot Yoga, otherwise known as Bikram Yoga, is a routine of 26 yoga postures done in a room heated to 37 degrees.

The
heat, which mimics the weather conditions of India, the home of yoga,
is believed to help with flexibility, detoxify the body and build
endurance. “This yoga is going to change the skeletal structure of your
body, slowly, over time. The heat helps to do that,” says Rodney Korky,
who has taught Bikram Yoga in Australia and the United States.

To
Bikram Yoga’s followers it’s not just an intense, grueling, 90-minute
workout in a room with 40 other sweaty bodies. It is a life changing
experience.

“It’s
a mental thing, not just physical. It’s about focusing your mind and
getting through it,” says Paul Woodward, who has been practising this
unique style of yoga for just over two months. “Since I’ve been coming
I’ve been eating much healthier, feeling better and I’m much more
energised.”

The
founder of this unusual style of yoga is Bikram Choudhury, who began
practising yoga at the age of four. He is renowned by some as “the man
who brought yoga to the west”, but The Yoga Journal has also dubbed him
“Yoga’s Bad Boy”.

Bikram
humbly began his career in the US almost 30 years ago, but he soon
abandoned the practice of giving free yoga lessons and his yoga is now
the hottest thing (literally and figuratively) in Hollywood.

Well-known
among Hollywood’s glitterati, he leads a somewhat extravagant lifestyle
in a Beverly Hills Mansion, making $3 million annually from his teacher
training courses alone.

But
his material abundance and his straight talking, drill-sergeant
teaching technique have not deterred the many Bikram students and
teachers who follow his style almost religiously.

Although
Bikram Yoga has not yet become a franchise, Phil Goodwin, who owns and
runs a Bikram studio in Surry Hills with his partner Nicole Walsh, says
that is where it’s heading. With 650 yoga studios worldwide, Bikram is
currently aiming to copyright his unique brand of yoga and turn it into
a franchise. In doing so he has been accused by some in the yoga
community as “commodifying spirituality”.

Goodwin,
who has just completed a weekend seminar in Sydney led by Bikram
Choudhury himself, talks with an enthusiasm that is not uncommon
amongst followers. “Bikram is such an amazing person. It’s a pretty
amazing style of yoga, that’s for sure. It changed my life anyway,” he
says.

The Surry Hills studio
has only been open for six months, but it is already fiercely popular.
It holds 26 classes a week, with anywhere between 20 to 60 people
attending each class. “It has become more and more popular,” says
Goodwin. “And the reason it has is because it works, it’s as simple as
that. It gets results and people in the western world respond to
results.”

Not
everybody is so impressed with Bikram Yoga however. “I feel like
somebody has beaten me up with a stick and left me by the side of the
road,” says Veronika Kopacikova after her first class. “The first time
is crazy, you don’t know what’s going on, you can’t really get it
together, the heat is freaking you out, but it does get easier really
quick,” assures the instructor, Rodney.